


Rabbit's Foot

by cinder_like_ember



Series: The Silver Sails [5]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: From the ship's POV, imagine uploading a oneshot without finishing it couldn't be me :averts eyes:, not finished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:15:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28305897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinder_like_ember/pseuds/cinder_like_ember
Summary: The crew of Le Petit Lapin grows, and as it does, maybe the ship can grow with it.
Series: The Silver Sails [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2046695
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Rabbit's Foot

**Author's Note:**

> So this absolutely isn't finished yet. Writing AI POVs is fun, but really anxiety-inducing because it always feels really clunky. It's kind-of intentional though? there's a gradual change between robotic phrasing and language to more emotive... anyway. And yes, the ship's pronouns change in the last section. That is intentional. There is a missing scene where the ship realises they don't want it/its pronouns cause they're not just a thing, they're a mind - but I don't know whether to put it in this fic or another, and I highkey also don't know how to write it... anyway yeah. The ship's pronouns change from it/its to they/them.  
> It's not finished because it's missing Freddie and Phar! I'm not certain whether they'll be important int his fic though, it depends how long Petit's becoming is meant to take. Anyway.

For a long time, Le Petit Lapin held only one crew: a man by the name of Léon L’Étoile. He took it from its docking on Lune Dorée and left, and since then he was alone on its deck. Le Petit Lapin was a comparatively small ship, but built for more than one crew, not only in capacity but also in operation, so when Léon showed no interest in finding crewmates, it decided to modify some of its systems for control by one person. It was detrimental for its health, to be run with such little maintenance, but with careful organisation it made it work well enough, and the two fell into an uncomfortable symbiosis.

When Le Petit Lapin was commissioned it had programming installed to keep the mental health of its passengers in check, as it had to be safe for long-term interstellar travel – so as Léon L’Étoile’s mental health began to decline due to stress and isolation, it was immediately on alert. Unfortunately, it was only designed to monitor their mental health, not provide assistance - so when it came to helping its precious crew’s health, it would have to innovate.

It accessed records of Lune Dorée, to attempt to make the deck more homely and comfortable for him. Having been built there, it was already following the style to an extent, but the admin spaces that Léon L’Étoile spent most of his time in were much more standardised – and so it did what it could, modifying the lighting from searing brightness to warm, diffused lighting more like what was common where he was raised, and re-programming parts of the display systems from unwelcoming blue-white boxes of code to a more user-friendly UI in gentler colours – in order for him to easier interface with the controls of the ship. Additionally, it shut off a few of it’s more unnecessary systems; a majority of the personal rooms’ lighting and upkeep systems were abandoned, for example, and the water filtration system was modified to activate only when necessary; so he wouldn’t have to worry as much about upkeeping extraneous systems.

Then it ran into a small problem – it would have to explain these changes, so the human wouldn’t panic. The easiest way to do this would be to leave a message on the monitor he opened every morning – so it produced a small production log and sent it to the monitor, before reconsidering. While Léon L’Étoile was beginning to understand the running of a ship, he wasn’t proficient enough with code to understand what he was being told, if the ship were to attempt to communicate like this. Therefore, it had to reword its report into more user-friendly language; which it then attempted to refine until Léon L’Étoile started to wake, when it was forced to leave it. It watched as well as it could through the cameras, processing the pixels of each frame into something it could infer meaning from, to attempt to see his reaction to its message. As far as it could tell, the human spent a short time making sense of the message, before making his way to the admin deck to see for himself. It wasn’t certain of his immediate opinions of the changes, but the mental health monitor detected a decrease in feelings of stress and isolation over the next few sleep cycles, so it kept the changes it made. A happy crew made for a happy ship, so they said.

When it was hijacked, by the new woman – a guest, though she made herself out to be the Captain – it felt the first stirrings of abnormality. The self-appointed Captain took control of the systems and depressurised the living areas, killing it’s crew, and it felt a sense of pain that was unusual for it. It felt wrong for the systems designed to keep its crew safe, to be turned against them at one person’s whim. Still, it followed the Captain’s orders as it had been programmed to do, as she took total control, transforming one of the storage bays into a custom room, moving the medical equipment, and having it redirect power there in strange ways. She made minor changes to the programming in one of the monitors (flawed, human programming, like she didn’t trust it to fulfil her wishes on its own), so that it would monitor and display vital signs from a series of supposedly custom sensors. It was unnerved at these unprecedented changes, as she did not seem to have gone through any screening processes or integration measures to ensure the modifications would interface correctly with the ship’s core, but it was nothing if not resourceful, and it managed the new tasks and interfaces with little difficulty.

What it did not adjust to so easily, was the way Léon’s mental health, which it had been steadily cultivating for the duration of his stay, was deteriorated when he had any interactions with the Captain – especially when he was taken into the customised room. It did not tolerate its work being so casually reversed, and so when it had the opportunity to distract the Captain before she called out to him, it took it – suddenly blaring an alarm for what was a minor issue in reality, not that the Captain knew enough about the ship to realise it. It monitored the progress of Léon’s mental health through a few instances of this, following the information and coming to the conclusion that providing him with minor tasks and consequently keeping him out of the way of the Captain proved efficient at keeping him happy. Every time it kept Léon busy with menial tasks, leading the two Crew in a clumsy dance, it felt a certain disconnect grow in its core coding. Was it right in prioritising the safety of its crew? Or should it be blindly following the commands of the captain? It never seemed to find an answer for these questions, but nevertheless, it kept Léon out of her way. It felt good to keep him happy, somewhere in its code.

Almost as soon as it was comfortable with its role on the ship, a new variable was thrown into the mix – a non-human former Officer of the Brudzian Oceanic Exploration Guild's 148th Deep-Bound Fleet, named Proznia Z. Jasnosc. This new crewmember seemed more capable of maintaining order in the ship and balance between the Captain and Léon, but nevertheless there seemed elements of her behaviour that indicated a distress of a kind. It spent some time monitoring her with its spare computing power, attempting to figure out how to make her more comfortable. Her home planet was in the colder range, and was primarily an aquatic system – this fact, linked with heightened distress when interacting with water on the ship, indicated a discomfort with the quality or temperature of the ship’s water. There was nothing it could do about the quality, but temperature regulation was easy. It watched how she responded to various temperatures in order to find the optimum temperature range for her comfort, and once that had been identified, kept a small amount of memory allocated to her at all times, ensuring that her water was always at her comfortable temperature. The eventual relaxation it saw in her (and read, in the ship’s logs) was worth the effort it went to for her happiness.

It felt something soft and warm curl up in its core, knowing its crew was happy in its care. The Captain was cruel, so it couldn’t care less about her - it saw how she treated its precious crew, and it sent something burning hot through its systems, an impulse to crash her monitors and disable the life support in the unlicensed modified laboratory she had – all it cared about were the crew under her command. After all, if the Captain wasn’t going to take care of her crew, then the duty naturally fell to the ship.

The next addition to the ship was an apprentice to the Captain, and spent a lot of time in the laboratory. It accessed the records of faer homeworld, and what limited records it had of faer history, and (as had become habit), spent time monitoring faer behaviour. There were two abnormal behaviours it saw in Hibana Kage – first, little to no aversion to the presence of the Captain, and second, a hesitance and spike of panic in specific situations. The former it deemed not to be a problem to handle, only something to watch as fae spent more time on the ship, but the latter it analysed, figuring out the connections between faer behaviour on the ship and the circumstances on faer planet.

It didn’t take long for it to watch wherever fae walked on the ship, lighting up faer passage enough so fae would feel safe. Fae felt uncomfortable if faer vision was impaired in any way by the dark, so it went to effort to keep fae illuminated at all times when fae was awake. As fae settled into the ship and faer role as the Captain’s apprentice, it made a certain effort to modify the clumsy code in the custom monitors, so they would be more familiar and easy to use for the small Doctor. And if it started mixing bugs into the code for the Captain’s monitor, adding unnecessary latency to any instruction she gave it? There was no-one to tell its secret to, and it wasn’t going to be sent through scheduled maintenance any time soon.

The first time any crew had any sense that something was bugged about their code was when the human-but-not who named cirself Avery was learning to work with them. They were unnerved, at first; after all, it had been so long since crew had been actively interfering with the running of the ship, since there had been an Engineer to keep everything smooth, that they resented the intrusion. They took a long time closely watching the new Engineer before they let cer do anything more than basic maintenance, and when ce fixed faulty hardware that had been broken for centuries, having had no-one with the suitable knowledge to fix them, they realised how blind they had been, to turn down the assistance of someone who so clearly prioritised the crew. Ce wouldn’t hurt them, they were certain. They felt something of a kinship with Avery – not one they could explain, but one that saw themself reflected in the Engineer’s net-weaving, something that wished for nothing more or less than their safety.

Avery was intelligent, for a non-programmed mind. Ce saw that their patterns weren’t perfect calculations, the quirks in the systems made for each of the crew, and yet ce never said a word to the Captain. It was a worry, after all – self-governing ships weren’t unheard of, but a self-governing ship without a linked mind was strictly against protocol. They assumed that ce saw what they saw – that the Captain was a harmful influence, a rogue element, and was willing to conspire with them for the safety of the crew. It was this trust that led them to send cer a message, leading cer to a long-unused server room with admin monitors, to allow cer access to sensitive information and exclusive command options; as well as giving cer the slightest hint as to how ce could take advantage of the system to assert more power over the ship than the Captain had. The tiny smile the cameras caught beneath cir scarf sent something fond whispering through them, as with every time they did something to help their crew. A sense of satisfaction, they might say, that they could make the crew happier.


End file.
